Sex Ed Saturday: Lets Talk About Nudes

Ok folks, real talk; most people take naked pictures of themselves. Even if you normally don’t, things happen. Sometimes, you get a little tipsy, you realize your phone has a camera built in and you rationalize that you’re only going to send it to your partner right? Right?! Wrong! You can send it to the wrong person, or you can get extra confident and send it to everyone. If you can not handle people you have to interact with seeing your nudes don’t send them to people, and especially don’t make porn of yourself. Breakups make people bitter and terrible and they do and say things that you didn’t think they would be capable of.

Once upon a time I was young, impressionable, and angry at my parents; I was the perfect storm of teenage angst and I made porn (sorry if you end up reading this mom). There was no lighting or fancy cameras, hell the video quality was awful, we still had flip phones. I knew it wasn’t the smartest choice, but someone older than me was paying attention to me and I wanted to seem mature. I had a thing for authority figures and made some bad choices.
I would not think about this again until one day in college when I got fired from a nannying job because the mother had caught the husband watching pornography of what was clearly a younger me. I made a drastic shift in career choices then, I decided I was never going to be a teacher (as I was haunted by the memory of my 7th grade science teacher having her career ruined because a boy said he saw her in porn). I gave up on nannying to pay my way through college and decided I was going to own it. I posted my own nudes, became a cam model and made enough money to pay for a semester of college.
Someone, who had once been an authority figure chose to share my nudes, and in doing so tried to shame me. I chose to beat them to the punch. In doing so I ensured that I will never work with children, I also ensured that there is now a very real chance that every future employer I have will know what I look like naked. I made peace with that the day someone tried to shame me for being sexually active.
Nudes are a sign of trust, you are trusting another person to not exploit you. You are trusting that person to keep the nudes to themselves and to delete them if you ever part ways. The person you send the nudes to may not be the one who betrays your trust. It may be a new partner who gets jealous or it may be a shitty friend who takes their phone. Once you send a nude out into the world you don’t have control over what happens to it, not really.
Not everyone should make the choices I made. Phones can be hacked or lost, people get drunk and angry and make poor choices, and anything on the internet is forever. There is nothing wrong with naked pictures of yourself, I have friends I habitually share nudes with because ladies appreciate ladies (frexting for the win). But remember before you send those pictures or post them online for a confidence boost you better be comfortable with your mother seeing them because it is a definite possibility (unless she’s amish).